principle for which the neutrals of 1780 had so strenuously contended, was an argumentative victory for them; but it was far more; it was a triumph for those thinkers who have always maintained that all law must rest upon a basis of fact, that except in so far as law declares the relation which ought to subsist between facts which a previous analysis has ascertained, it is useless, and even mischievous. The first fifteen years of the present century were marked by all that turbulence which had characterised the closing years of that which went before, and there were not wanting in both periods instances of blockades perseveringly prosecuted and gallantly resisted. In the beginning of 1800, for example, Genoa was the only city in Italy held by the French; the Austrian troops invested it by land, and English war-ships blocked the passage seaward. The beleaguered Genoese saw the usual incidents of an old-fashioned blockade. From time to time, one of the light privateers which lay behind the little island of Capraja, north-east of Corsica, would succeed in eluding all the vigilance of Admiral Keith’s squadron, and carry in provisions enough to prolong for a while the desperate resistance of Massena’s garrison; and now the blockaders would retaliate by ‘cutting out’ a galley from beneath the very guns of the harbour. One day a gale might drive the jealous sentinels to sea; but on the next, they were back at their old stations, there to wait with patience until pestilence and famine should bring the city to its doom. Sixty years later and in another hemisphere, the maritime world was to see how far the new appliances of elaborate science had altered the modes in which blockades were to be enforced and evaded.